Asahi Shimbun Publishing has stopped selling a dialogue book by journalist and lawmaker Mochizuki Isoko after it was found to contain multiple errors, and Mochizuki says her lawyers are preparing an explanation.
The book, a collection of conversations with Uchida Shigeru, chair of Kobe College, was published in September under the Asahi Shinsho imprint. Asahi Shimbun Publishing issued an apology and correction on Oct. 27, fixing and deleting the erroneous passages, then announced the sales halt on Nov. 1.
Mochizuki, 51, who reports for the Tokyo Shimbun, spoke to Shukan Bunshun in central Tokyo on the morning of Oct. 31.
“I'm working through it with my lawyer now, and we'll release a compiled statement. We're putting materials together, and once that's done, the other side's lawyer has asked for an explanation of how this happened.”Mochizuki, Tokyo Shimbun reporter
What the book got wrong
The errors center on Kawanaka Daiji, 15, a first-year high school student who founded the Nihon Chugakusei Shimbun, a newspaper written by and for middle schoolers. It has reported on elections and on problems with the Osaka-Kansai Expo. Mochizuki described him in the book as having "guts."
Her account of him was wrong on several counts. The episode in which a school teacher tore down his wall newspaper was inaccurate, as was her version of how he came to start the paper. In one passage the book calls the boy her son, and says he is interested in politics and reads works such as Nihon Rettō Kaizōron, a 1972 bestseller by the late prime minister Tanaka Kakuei.
Asked about a Sankei Shimbun interview published Oct. 29, in which she said the content of the dialogue appeared to have been confused with that of a different conversation, Mochizuki said she had described what she heard but that the wording changed when it was written up.
“On the point that I'm fabricating things that differ from the facts, I was talking about what I had heard. But as a result, when it came to be written down, it had changed a little.”Mochizuki, Tokyo Shimbun reporter
The full interview with Mochizuki, and an interview with Kawanaka himself about the affair, appear in the current digital edition of Shukan Bunshun, Bunshun Online reported.